Finding Jack Harkness
by hophophop
Summary: I wanted to know more about how/why Jack learned what had happened to the first captain and what that history means to him. Response to 1x12 and the last 5 episodes of Doctor Who S1. I was also influenced by a conversation in "Utopia" (Doctor Who S3), but there are no spoilers for that episode. Mention of Rose and the Doctor. Originally written July 2007.


Finding Jack Harkness

He'd usurped the man's identity originally because he was dead in another city, and his description was a good match. He hadn't planned to remain Jack Harkness after the con, but then circumstances changed; everything changed. Chances of discovery evaporated when they left that time and place, and he simply enjoyed the persona too much. He didn't want to complicate things with Rose and the Doctor with explanations of who and why. He wanted to be Jack.

It wasn't until his second pass through World War II that he bothered to look up Harkness's history and find out what had happened to his namesake. By the time it occurred to him to find out more, the miracle of coming back to life had long since been overshadowed by the misery of dozens of deaths, and the question of why was sinking into the bitter bog of "why did he leave me behind?" He had been Jack Harkness for so long, he completely forgot the anniversary of his own incarnation. It was a month later, February 1941, when he remembered his birthday, for lack of a better term. He spent some minutes attempting to calculate which birthday it was, either negative 200,000-something or around 70. Or was it one month? Just as well he had missed it, since the temptation to mess with timelines by confronting the Doctor would have been too great. Or perhaps not, he was a changed man after all, doing the right thing, at least when it counted. He was beginning to wonder if the con man had had the right of it after all.

He was working in the war office, having given up flying this time around and finding his way into military intelligence. The particular branch he was with seemed to have murky ties with various secret agencies, some of which had been around for decades, or centuries, if you believed the stories, which he mostly did. That February afternoon the office was quiet, and he walked down seven flights of stairs to the records archive, a floor below the bomb shelter, to see if he could find out anything about Captain Jack Harkness the first, deceased.

There was no reason for the short obituary to have affected him the way it did. Hundreds of captains died to save their men, and thousands upon thousands of soldiers died to protect the country or freedom or honor or whatever it was they were all doing here. Billions in wars throughout time and space. He himself had killed, he didn't know how many. Insanity, no question; humanity rarely seemed to get it right. But reading the few short phrases about Harkness brought to mind, for the first time since he was a kid, the individual sacrifices people make for faith, for honor, for each other. In the next few weeks he sought out members of the squad and heard the story, the excitement of success in battle, the radio silence, the fire and the crash site. The men were respectful, some visibly grieving the loss. And yet one or two of them were uncomfortable discussing it. It was odd — not the usual superstition about death or survivor guilt, but an uneasiness, as if the topic were distasteful, inappropriate somehow. Digging deeper, he saw that two men had put in for transfers the day Harkness died. One of them had already been killed and the other had shipped to Africa, so he didn't follow up.

As the years passed and information access finally improved, he learned more about Harkness, where he grew up, where he had gone to school, what his family was like. He arranged to meet his sister in the 1960s, pretending to be an academic researching pre-Pearl Harbor volunteers for his dissertation. She was quite happy to talk about her younger brother who by then had become idealized in memory: funny, kind, clever, honest, brave — she told stories of him climbing a derelict water tower to rescue a kitten, bringing flowers to their mother every Sunday, winning the state debate championship, defending classmates against bullies. She said that was why he had signed up, dropping out of college and so infuriating their father who had remained staunchly isolationist through World War I and had never accepted his son's decision. They had not reconciled before Harkness was killed, and his sister believed their father had died, only in his 50s, because of that anger and sorrow. She showed him a picture, the only one he'd seen of Harkness. It was her wedding photo, the whole family grouped together, and the seventeen-year-old Harkness was standing behind and to her left, a tiny grinning face, hardly discernible. Still, he felt his gut clench, like he recognized something, like he was seeing someone he'd lost.

At this point his disillusion, the need to believe that things would only continue getting worse, to be right about the causes for despair, was all that kept him going. He did not know why the Doctor had cursed him with life and then discarded him, and he told himself he didn't care any more. He was moving up in Torchwood, known for his ambition and recklessness and uncanny ability to survive. Given the conspiracy theories running rampant, he was sure some people there suspected what was going on with all his apparent near misses, but he went out of his way to avoid confirming or even acknowledging the rumors about his little quirk of biology. He didn't want to think about it. He felt dead inside, that was close enough. But then the grainy black and white image of Harkness reached in there and gave a twist. It was no floodgate, but he did begin to question himself and notice his callousness now and then. He realized that Rose would be born in a few decades, and his early memories of her were not so painful anymore; dancing, flirting, his ridiculous attempts to manipulate the time agent he thought she was, and how the joke was on him. He couldn't follow the memories further, not yet. But he liked to think about Rose and the young Jack Harkness and wonder if they would have gotten along. He couldn't imagine either of them wanting to have much to do with him, now.

By the 1990s, he was rather ashamed of the wallow of self-pity he'd dug back then. He couldn't shake all his cynicism, but he had come around to a personal philosophy that it was better to do something more or less good than not, damn the Doctor. It was easier to think about Harkness doing the right thing. He did not have much faith that his actions really made a difference, but he did believe that Harkness had managed it, and so he kept on trying. Acted as if he believed he could make a difference, and maybe now and then he would. Sometimes he imagined changing departments to hunt for the Doctor within Torchwood, but his fragile integrity would only permit him to wait by the Rift while working on behalf of humanity and the greater good, the con man inside shaking his head at this facade. The fact that Cardiff was also the last place Harkness had lived was ironic, to be sure, but it also felt right, like he belonged there. He could admit to himself that he found comfort from that fact, like he had settled in his ancestral home. It also made him laugh at himself, which wasn't a bad thing either. He discovered he could have fun, lose himself in another person for a few hours, give and receive moments of camaraderie or pleasure. It was better than nothing, as long as he didn't dwell much on what it was not. By this time he was very good at not thinking about the things he could do nothing about.

So here it was, 2006, and his current team was working well but showing signs of wear; it'd been a rough year for all of them, and he thought there would be a crisis soon. But it wasn't something he could fix, so that day he asked Tosh to come along since her personal life seemed least likely to spill over into attitude on site. They entered the old hall, heard the music, crossed time. When they tried to leave, he saw the sign advertising the dance, and this time he recognized the date immediately. He didn't think much of it; it was an unlikely coincidence, but he was long used to those. Happy Birthday to me, he thought, not thinking about the original Harkness at all. When the captain intervened to break up the fight on the dance floor, he thought he looked familiar, but seeing people he thought he might have met before was a side effect of his lifespan, so he paid no attention until the captain said their name. For a second all he could see was that black and white photograph, the grinning kid in a dark suit, so alive in that moment, reaching in and giving his gut another wrench, this time opening the sluice wide, and it was as though every emotion he hadn't felt for 140 years was released out through his chest.


End file.
